


Afterthought

by Fiachra



Series: Ace Jake [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Ace Jake Peralta, Asexual Character, Asexuality, Bi Jake Peralta, Coming Out, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Slight AU I guess?, biromantic character, supportive friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 08:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15991124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiachra/pseuds/Fiachra
Summary: He comes home, and Rosa comes out. Jake helps support her throughout the process, and nearly tells her they’re the same at least a dozen times. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why he hesitates, because it’s who he is. Their shared truth. No more, no less.He thinks.He always assumed.He’s not so sure anymore.But what else could he be?





	Afterthought

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I adore the bisexual Jake Peralta headcanon, I do, but this idea hit me out of nowhere and would not leave me alone until I did something with it. I actually wasn't sure about publishing this story but then I reread [_Space_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5630563) by less_than_happyy and it gave me the push I needed (thank you!), it's great and you should check it out.  
>  Huge thanks to piratearrowxab who listened to me ramble about this then gave me the best piece of Boyle dialogue ever, thank you friend!  
> This is dedicated to anyone who's ever felt that they weren't ace enough. I hope you find happiness.

“Fun side note, I later lost my virginity to Mrs. Stratton’s daughter. It was… very fast.”

Charles had replied with “Nice,” which was, well, just Charles being Charles, but it hadn’t been that nice.

Not really.

He hadn’t known what he was doing, and he remembers feeling that everything was too close, too much. There was no epiphany, no fireworks like he’d been led to believe, and he remembered his heart beating faster and faster (but not in a good way) and the next thing he knew he couldn’t breathe and panicked tears were threatening to make themselves known.

(They did, later that day when he was alone.)

Unsurprisingly, she hadn’t kept in contact with him.

Jake had brushed the incident off in the days that followed, chalked it down to a slight bump in the road and inexperience and instead focused on how he’d be better the next time such an occasion came around.

Because there would be a next time, it’s what happened when you found people pretty and they found you as such in return, it’s just how these things worked.

And besides, orgasms are fun, and once he figures out what he’s doing they’re fun with other people too. He likes making his partners feel good, and the intimacy afterwards was great. Spooning is _awesome._

He learns the word bisexual not too long afterwards, and wordlessly adopts it for himself. He finds both men and women beautiful, so that’s what he is, right?

But despite the word and despite that panic of the first time never really plaguing him again, Jake feels like he’s out of step with everyone else, as if their Guide to Life has extra pages that his doesn’t. Sometimes he feels that awful lurching feeling of missing a step when he’s navigating relationships, and he’s too nervous to ask if anyone else feels that too.

It’s all little things. Frowning when he’s torn out of his admiration for a gorgeous stranger when whoever he’s with at the time states, often crudely, how and where they’d like to fuck said gorgeous stranger. Not being able to stand to hear about the sex lives of others sometimes, because what they’re describing feels so utterly foreign to him but he can’t put his finger on why. Getting funny looks when he focuses on the romantic aspects of his current relationships rather than the sexy ones.

It’s not bad, per se, but it’s still enough for him to start throwing up defences. It’s a fragile shield, held together by a sense of false confidence and his extra reading, sex jokes and making an extra effort to use words like “hot” and “sexy”. It’s fragile, but no one seems to notice it wobble when one of his jokes fall flat, or he fumbles with assigning people and actions to categories like “sexy” or “not sexy whatsoever” or “that was an innuendo”.

Jake becomes just another normal dude in everyone’s heads, and that’s fine. If he can almost believe that himself that’s also fine.

If only he could just maintain relationships long-term and not have them end because of his inability to hold them together. At least, he assumes it his fault, it’s kinda hard not to when he’s sitting opposite someone at a restaurant and listening to them tell him that it has to end because he’s not mature enough for them or he’s not as interested in the same parts of a relationship that they are and it hurts, obviously, but he shrugs and carries on, aims to be better for the next person. But what happens instead is that he doesn’t date as much as his friends would expect. He’s busy with work anyway.

  


***

  


Jake’s feelings for Amy creep up on him slowly before hitting him repeatedly over the head like a madman with a sack of bricks. He always found her pretty, but one day it’s like an invisible curtain he was unaware of lifts, and suddenly she’s _beautiful_. Stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. He wants to take her to dinner and make her laugh and go on dates and cuddle and-

 _Have sex?_ His brain supplies.

Well, he likes her a lot, and he trusts her, and did he mention he really likes her? And he supposes it doesn’t hurt that she is very pretty.

So yes, he decides, if they started doing things _romantic stylez_ sex would probably be a lot of fun.

  


***

  


They go on a date, and they are both rather drunk, and suddenly they are kissing ( _“Frenching!?!”_ Boyle squeals excitedly in his head) quite passionately in his apartment and he can’t quite put his finger on how they got from the restaurant to here.

Amy is enthusiastically working on opening his shirt buttons before he’s even registered her doing it.

“Are you sure?” she asks, and Jake blames the alcohol for not being entirely sure what she’s asking him about.

He’s distracted by how close they are, and how nice this closeness feels, comfortable and not at all like he’s being crowded.

“Sure? Oh! Sex! Rules! Yeah, I don’t mind breaking that rule if you don’t.”

“I don’t.” She says, grinning, before getting back to work on his shirt and her mouth has moved from his to his neck and _damn_ it feels good.

It’s far better than the few tentative, exploratory fantasies he’d conjured up before, which isn’t saying much considering how his fantasies tend to get derailed by his brain spiralling off on its own little tangent to completely unrelated topics, but it is, without a doubt, better than anything he’s ever done before.

(And Amy is an _insanely_ good cuddler, he’s never felt so safe.)

  


***

  


They stay together, and Jake had never been happier.

When prison tears them apart he misses just being with Amy the most, he misses waking up next to her and cuddling on the couch and stolen kisses at work.

When he realises sex isn’t as high as he feels it should be on the list of things he misses, he feels scared despite not knowing why. He doesn’t stop to consider why that is, instead he decides to pretend he never had that thought for as long as possible.

  


***

He comes home, and Rosa comes out. Jake helps support her throughout the process, and nearly tells her they’re the same at least a dozen times. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why he hesitates, because it’s who he is. Their shared truth. No more, no less.

He thinks.

He always assumed.

He’s not so sure anymore.

But what else could he be?

  


***

  


The universe works in mysterious ways, and apparently its chosen vessel for prodding Jake to reflect on such things once and for all is Charles.

It’s when they’re waiting in Jake’s car on a stakeout, and Jake is watching raindrops roll down the windscreen very intently in an effort to block out Charles’ overly explicit rundown of what he and Genevieve did last night.

“Charles can you please ease off that particular conversation topic?”

Charles stops talking with a bashful grin. “Sorry Jake, but you know how it is when you’re so romantically and sexually attracted to a person, sometimes I get carried away.”

Thunder rumbles overhead, and when Jake thinks back on this moment it seems like a solid divider between the old way of understanding and the new.

He frowns.

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

“Not necessarily,” Charles says, helpful as always, “I looked up some stuff about different orientations when Rosa came out, according to what I read you can feel both at the same time or independently."

There is a flash of lighting that lights up the car’s interior, but Jake barely acknowledges it. His brain has somehow frozen on a buffering screen and is simultaneously racing at a thousand miles an hour.

“So what’s the difference?”

If Charles is in any way confused with having this conversation on a stakeout of all places, he doesn’t show it. “If you’re romantically attracted to someone you want to do romantic things with them, which can include sex, and sexual attraction is just wanting to have sex with someone.”

Jake tries and fails to calm his racing heart. He feels like he does when he’s approaching the solution to a case, when all of the evidence is in front of him, and he knows what connects everything is hovering just out of reach.

_“Weird or sexy?”_

_“White guy, svelte, thick brown hair, piercing blue eyes…I don’t know I guess you could consider him classically handsome? Is that weird to say?”_

_“No. I mean - is it? No - I don’t think so.”_

_“You know, once we get it, we'll have to break it in.”_

_“Oh, I hear what you're saying: Mattress trampoline. Wait, no. You were talking about sex.”_

He thinks about how much he adores Amy, how when he imagined all the things they could do _romantic stylez_ sex had been almost an afterthought. How he enjoyed it, but almost forgot its existence sometimes.

“And,” he hopes Charles can’t hear the tremor in his voice, “what if you don’t feel one or the other?”

“Then that would be aromantic or asexual. Jake, are you okay?”

Jake takes a deep breath, blinks rapidly. “What if, what if _I’m_ asexual?” He whispers.

“Oh Jake,” he can feel Charles touch his arm but his face is blurred. “That’s okay. You don’t need to figure everything out now.”

“Thanks Charles.”

There’s a flicker of movement ahead and Jake throws himself out of the car, dashing an arm across his misty eyes (if anyone asks it was the rain). He can think more about this Earth-tilting-on-its-axis revelation later, but now they have a perp to catch.

  


***

  


He Googles it later, after Amy has gone to bed, and only stops reading when the words start to sway and dance like the kelp in the episode of _Blue Planet II_ the two of them had watched the previous night. He slips into bed and wraps one arm around her, not giving into sleep for a long time.

Charles gives him a reassuring smile when he arrives in the next morning, but in what must be a first and a minor miracle he doesn’t hint or say anything that suggests they discussed anything unusual during the stakeout.

In a way, Jake thinks, having delved into it makes things more confusing. He stares intently at passersby when he and Rosa go for a mid-morning coffee, trying to see if he finds them solely sexually attractive. But all that happens is that he thinks himself into feeling somewhat aroused, and that’s not the point of the exercise. Is it? Maybe that’s what everyone else does? Why did the world suddenly become so much more complicated?

“Hey man, you okay?” Rosa asks, squinting at him, “You’ve been burning a hole in that dude’s back for a while now.”

Jake shakes himself out of his temporary space-out and nods. Then shakes his head. Then nods again.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Sure?”

The question is out in the world before he can stop it. “How do you know if you’re sexually attracted to someone?”

She raises her eyebrows, and he withers somewhat.

“Please Rosa?”

His tone must have convinced her, because she shrugs. “You just know, you know? It just feels different from other feelings.”

“You don’t confuse the feelings sometimes?”

“No. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, I just remembered that I have a load of paperwork to do.” He flees, feeling like a coward as he feels Rosa’s stare on his back.

  


***

  


Jake sneaks glances around the precinct throughout the afternoon, repeating the same experiment. It does nothing but bring him back to the early days of knowing his squad, when he had shifted through muddled feelings for days before sorting out where he stood with them.

He sighs heavily, resting his chin in his hand, and gives Amy a perky thumbs up with his free hand when she asks if he’s alright.

 _This is stupid,_ he says to himself, _you were supposed to figure this out_ years _ago, it’s not that big of a deal._

 _You sure about that?_ His brain hisses back, _if it wasn’t such a big deal and you knew it didn’t apply to you, you wouldn’t be spending this much time on it._

He doesn’t have a snappy retort for that.

  


***

Waiting until Amy has gone into the kitchen to review her bills, Jake delves into the Internet again, feeling much more equipped to navigate this new world the second time around. He discovers the words grey ace and demisexual, sees some articles that click, others that almost do. He doesn’t feel like he’s making much progress until he stumbles onto a new word:

_Biromantic describes a person who is romantically attracted to two sexes or genders_

Well. That fits. He lets loose a quiet “Yes!” and grins at his laptop screen. He’s getting somewhere. Something makes sense.

Jake adds an extra tick beside the words _romantic stylez_ he’s written on a sheet of paper next to him and scans through the rest.

 _1\. Libido_ – check

 _2\. Kinks_ – yep

 _3\. Enjoys sex_ – he does

 _4\. Experiences sexual attraction_ \- ????

Just as he’s staring at those four messy questions silently taunting him, Amy walks in, smiling at him. Jake looks up and looks at her, really looks at her. He sees her kind eyes, her amazing smile, her hair, down for the evening and soft as always, and the engagement ring on her finger as she cradles her mug of tea.

Jake sees the absolute love of his life, but he doesn’t think he sees her _that_ way, the way he’s supposed to. He feels a magnetic pull to be by her side, certainly, and to love and support and be her friend for as long as he can, but that’s not what the online pages say is the attraction he’s questioning feeling.

It’s scary, he realises. Like a normally sold and dependable road beneath his feet has suddenly fallen away, one he can’t replace as it was, leaving him unsure and questioning everything he thought he knew.

Without warning, he starts to cry.

Ugly, heaving sobs on Amy’s shoulder as she puts down her mug and holds him close, murmuring comforts into his ear and rubbing his back in the way she knows he likes.

“Babe, what is it?” she asks when his sobs become quieter.

Jake shakes his head, he can’t tell her this _now_ , they’re getting married soon! What will she think? This is something he should have realised _ages_ ago!

“Jake please, I want to help.”

Feeling like he’s moving through treacle, he nods towards the laptop and waits for what must be a geological age as she looks at his list and skims down through the webpage.

Amy then turns to him and pulls him into another hug. “Is this what was bothering you?”

He nods, eyes squeezed shut.

“Jake, look at me please.”

He does.

“You know I love you no matter what, right? And you are so unique, and I love you for that, and you have so much love to give, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s not what you feel like it has to be. I will support you through this journey, all the way.”

“You’re not horrified or want to call off the wedding?”

She looks horrified now. “No! Of course not Jake, never.”

“But I don’t find you sexually attractive, at least I don’t think I do, I still don’t know.” He says in a tiny voice, staring at his sock-clad feet.

Amy is silent for a moment. “Jake,” she says seriously, “have I ever made you uncomfortable or pressured you into anything?”

“No! No, God, Amy no. Sex is fun, and when it’s with you it’s the best. I love being so close to you, and so intimate, and making you feel good, and I love you so much.”

Amy kisses him then, on the forehead, cheek and finally lips. She can taste his tears. “I love you so much too, and you make me feel more loved than anyone ever has, and if you want we can talk about changing anything in our relationship. Regardless of how you choose to identify, I am very proud of you and I think you’re ace.”

She smiles as he laughs, the sort of bubbly, hiccupping laugh that signals the start of feeling better after a bout of crying.

“That was a good one Ames.”

Amy smiles again, leans her forehead against his.

“I know.”

They are cuddling in bed (Jake being the little spoon) when he thinks over what he’s read and talked about with Amy. This time it feels less panicky, more curiosity-driven now that he’s certain Amy has his back all the way.

He thought of how he much he loved being sensuous (Amy’s word, but he decided he liked it) with Amy, how when they had sex they could laugh or be kinky or just be gentle and he never felt like he wasn’t enough. He thought back to when Amy had told him how she experienced attraction and how he was becoming more certain they didn’t experience the same thing. He thought, stomach full of happy butterflies, that through all of this the main thing running around his head was how lucky he was to be with someone he loved and trusted so much.

“I am biromantic, and asexual, and Amy Santiago is my favourite person in the world and I love her so much.”

It was nice to say aloud, and Amy had squeezed his hand then shrieked with laughter when he rolled over to tickle her sides.

  


***

  


The next day found Jake in the evidence room searching for a file with Charles and feeling lighter than he had in the previous two days. After some moment’s deliberation, he takes a deep breath and turns to his partner.

“Charles?”

“Yes Jake?”

“About the stakeout, I just wanted to say thanks. For being so understanding and indirectly getting me to look into that stuff, I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“You’re welcome, and you’ve figured out you’re-“ Charles faltered.

“Biromantic asexual, and Amy and I spoke about it last night, nothing’s going to change and she’s helping me with it.”

“Jake that’s great! I’m so happy that you’re learning more about yourself and that I could be of some help.” With a smile that could have outshone the sun and an excited Boyle wiggle, he threw his arms around Jake, who was expecting it and thus prepared to reciprocate.

The door opened and Rosa strode in, and on seeing what was happening looked ready to run straight out again.

Charles pulled away, coughed awkwardly and yanked, amazingly, the file they needed out of the box they needed behind them. 

“I got this, so I’m going to leave. This was ace Jake! I mean, not like _ace_ ace. Like you are ace but this was also ace and-“ He cut himself off mid-ramble and backed away clutching the file, narrowly avoiding backing into Rosa and nearly falling over a box in the process. “But bye for now, but not like _bi_. Like _bye_ bye-“

“I’ll see you in a moment.” Jake grinned and Charles finally left the room.

“Bi ace?” Rosa asked, astute as always and well able to interpret Charles’ rambles.

Jake shrugged, “That seems to be it.”

Rosa gave him a rare smile and punched his shoulder relatively gently, which meant it hurt but probably wouldn’t leave a bruise the next day. “That shit can be tough to figure out, so well done. Are you going to tell anyone?”

Jake shrugged again. “I’m not sure yet. But I don’t want Charles to explode either.”

“He’ll manage, I’ll keep an eye on him. And whether you tell them or not, I’ve got your back.”

“So we’re bi buds?” he quipped, feeling so giddy with love and acceptance that he felt he could float off the floor at any moment like Charlie and Grandpa Joe in _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory_.

Rosa groaned and turned to leave, but she was smiling.

“Rosa no! I aced that! Rosa!”

**Author's Note:**

> I'd really love to know what you guys thought, and thanks for reading!  
> Come say hi on Tumblr: @consultingzoologist


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